I was coming to see a sick man. Why, pshaw!’(I’d say)’there’s nothing wrong with you. Half of it’s only imagination!’”
“O mama! for Christ’s sake!” said Eugene frantically. “For Christ’s sake!”
He turned away, sick at heart, and caught at his throat with his fingers.
Then he went softly upstairs with Luke and Helen, approaching the sick-room with a shrivelled heart and limbs which had gone cold and bloodless. They paused for a moment, whispering, before he entered. The wretched conspiracy in the face of death filled him with horror.
“N-n-n-now, I wouldn’t stay but a m-m-m-minute,” whispered Luke. “It m-m-might make him nervous.”
Eugene, bracing himself, followed Helen blindly into the room.
“Look who’s come to see you,” her voice came heartily. “It’s Highpockets.”
For a moment Eugene could see nothing, for dizziness and fear. Then, in the gray shaded light of the room, he descried Bessie Gant, the nurse, and the long yellow skull’s-head of Coker, smiling wearily at him, with big stained teeth, over a long chewed cigar. Then, under the terrible light which fell directly and brutally upon the bed alone, he saw Ben. And in that moment of searing recognition he saw, what they had all seen, that Ben was dying.
Ben’s long thin body lay three-quarters covered by the bedding; its gaunt outline was bitterly twisted below the covers, in an attitude of struggle and torture. It seemed not to belong to him, it was somehow distorted and detached as if it belonged to a beheaded criminal. And the sallow yellow of his face had turned gray; out of this granite tint of death, lit by two red flags of fever, the stiff black furze of a three-day beard was growing. The beard was somehow horrible; it recalled the corrupt vitality of hair, which can grow from a rotting corpse. And Ben’s thin lips were lifted, in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation, about his white somehow dead-looking teeth, as inch by inch he gasped a thread of air into his lungs.
And the sound of this gasping—loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable,
